Abstract

Current helium-3 tube based thermal neutrondetectors have shortcomings in achieving simultaneously high efficiency and low voltage while maintaining adequate fieldability performance. By using a three-dimensional silicon diode pillar array filled with boron-10 these constraints can be overcome. The fabricated pillar structured detector reported here is composed of diameter silicon pillars with a pitch and height of . A thermal neutrondetection efficiency of and a neutron-to-gamma discrimination of at reverse bias were measured for this detector. When scaled to larger aspect ratio, a high efficiency device is possible.